A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

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Local Irishness: Storytelling, Heritage, and Place Attachment in Douglastown, Québec

by © Angelina Leggo

A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of Anthropology Memorial University of Newfoundland

May 2020

St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

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Abstract:

The community of Douglastown, on the Gaspé Peninsula in eastern Québec, has experienced profound change in recent years. An increase in migration to the area has relegated the once majority Anglophone population to a minority in the region. In response, community members use a history of Irish immigration to the area to

differentiate themselves from other places in the Gaspésie and across the province. They likewise use this legacy to strengthen and express place attachment, celebrate their

heritage and history, emphasize their language, and continue the traditions of the Catholic

Church, both within and outside of their community. Through interviews, participant

observation, mapping, and local research, I show how stories in Douglastown revolve

around these multiple expressions of Irishness and how this has created a framework for

defining belonging in the past that still resonates within the community today.

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Acknowledgements:

This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Denver Leggo, who taught me our family’s stories, a deep love for the places in l’Anse à Brillant, and why I should be proud of where I came from. Your love for our home was the inspiration for this research and I hope that you would be proud of what I’ve accomplished here.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the entire community of Douglastown and to all who took the time to participate in my research. I’m very proud that you trusted me with your stories and I hope that I’ve done them justice. It has meant so much for me to be able to participate in your community, your pride in and love for your home has been a driving force behind this thesis and in my personal life as a Gaspesian who happens to live somewhere else (for now).

To my amazing supervisor, Dr. Sharon Roseman, thank you so much for your constant support and belief in my ability to finish this thesis. You have taught me so much about perseverance and patience, as well as excellent editing and writing skills, and I’m grateful for it all: for every comment, suggestion, and question that has sculpted the way my writing has developed. You are truly an inspiration and a role model. Thank you for keeping me going!

I would also like to extend my sincere gratitude to Memorial University and the

Department of Anthropology and its staff. I have been blessed with supportive and caring individuals who continued to look out for my best interests long after I moved away from Newfoundland. Thank you to the mapping department of the Queen Elizabeth II Library, who came through with the maps I use here on very short notice. And, finally, thank you to my fellow graduate students, who put up with my stress and commiserated with me, sometimes even years after we all moved away, especially Mitch Fournie, Joy Brander, and Nehraz Mahmud. Those long hours at the office and our monthly suppers have stuck with me and are some of my favourite memories.

I’m grateful for the financial support that I’ve received throughout my studies, particularly to the Social Sciences and Human Research Council of Canada for the funding to complete my research and to Memorial University for the scholarship that enabled my education.

Finally, thank you to my amazing family. To my mother Sandra and to my brothers

Jeffrey and Jonathan, who each helped and supported me in different ways throughout

this process. To my children, who had to deal with multiple evenings and weekends of an

absent mother locked in her office. And to my amazing husband, whose love, support,

faith, and friendship got me through many, many moments where I just wanted to give

up. I love you all so much: in many ways this is for you.

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List of Figures

Figure 1 – View of the Barachois at Douglastown 2

Figure 2 – Towns along the Gaspé Coast 3

Figure 3 – A Breakdown of the Historic Douglas Township 5

Figure 4 – The Old Church in Douglastown 54

Figure 5 – The Cross from the Old Catholic Church in Douglastown 56 Figure 6 – The Original Hearth in the Oldest House in Douglastown 58

Figure 7 – The Lot where Kennedy’s House Burned 59

Figure 8 – Barrel Staves in a Barn 62

Figure 9 – The Old Fishplant in L’Anse à Brillant and Smoker’s Point 70 Figure 10 – An image of St. Patrick holding a shamrock 76

Figure 11 – Irish Iconography on Display 77

Figure 12 – The cover art of G is for the Gaspé 80

Figure 13 – Advertising the Douglastown Country Festival in 2012 99 Figure 14 – The Church Replica in the Holy Name Hall 117 Figure 15 – The White Brick on the Church, the Post Office, and the Holy Name Hall 119 Figure 16 – Cross on the Beach Commemorating the Community On the Point 144 Figure 17 – Denver’s Illustration and Modified Map of the Divisions of Leggo Land 164

Figure 18 – The Approximate Limits of Douglastown 172

Figure 19 – A Portion of the Shingling on Nancy’s House 182 Figure 20 – Original Photo of Nancy’s House, printed on tin 184 Figure 21 – An Abandoned Sawmill on the Second Range 188

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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Introducing Douglastown

On the top of a hill, overlooking a spit of sand that divides an ocean from a river’s estuary (see Figure 1), sits an imposing Catholic church dedicated to St. Patrick, flying the tri-colour Irish flag.

¹

Sitting to the left of its front door is an all-white statue of St.

Patrick, holding a single green four-leaf clover. The yellow brick church has green and orange trim and it is hugged by three buildings, a school, a hall, and a presbytery, constructed of the same yellow brick and decorated with the same green and orange.

Together, these buildings dominate the landscape through their proximity, their uniformity, and their positioning. They likewise embody stories about the past and present of the people who live in this place.

These four buildings are an example of an ongoing process of boundary creation and maintenance peculiar to Douglastown – one among a series of small towns along the Gaspé coast in eastern Québec that was settled by predominately English-speakers in the late18

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and early 19

^th

centuries. In the 1970s, Douglastown was amalgamated with various other small townships to create the town of Gaspé, a process which stripped the community of its formal boundaries. The boundary process is now tied up with place- making and storytelling practices that, together, delineate which inhabitants may lay claim to the local Irish heritage of the town.

1 This geographic formation is called a barachois and its placement within the area is central to the structure of the place, both historically and currently (Mimeault 2005).

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The people of Douglastown are in a state of transition, as the traditionally dominant Anglophone population dwindles, falling from 14.1% of the population in the town of Gaspé in 1996 to 11.6% in 2016, primarily due to an aging population and out-migration (Element 2003; Statistics Canada 1996, 2017; Vision Gaspé-Percé Now 2016). Those who remain are increasingly minoritized as Francophones migrate to the area, buying and building homes.

Figure 1: View of the Barachois at Douglastown. Photo provided and reproduced with permission of the Douglastown Community Centre in 2013.

The parameters of belonging within this community are fluid, shifting under

specific circumstances and in contexts where the boundaries of the community are

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challenged. Currently, the guidelines for inclusion are stretched by those within the boundaries to include more Anglophones and English-speakers as the socio-political and economic situation in the town evolves. The memories of Douglastown articulated today by the descendants of settlers from the early 19

^th

century suggest that community

belonging is and has been framed by three criteria, which reverberate throughout the community in numerous ways. They are comprised of Irish ancestry and links to the unique regional history; being Catholic or the descendant of a practicing Catholic family;

and being a native English speaker. Those able to trace their ancestry back to the original Irish Catholic settlers form the basis of the ‘real Douglastowners’ who have dominated socially, economically, and politically since the time of European settlement in the 1800s

Figure 2: Towns along the Gaspé Coast, including the enlarged area featured in Figure 3

and reproduced in Figure 18. February 2020, Memorial University of Newfoundland Map

Room, Queen Elizabeth II Library, St. John’s NL.

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until the early-2000s. I argue that shared local and ancestral history, religion, and language have long constituted markers of belonging in Douglastown and that these parameters are key components to the processes of storytelling and place-making that characterize the communication of the town’s history.

²

1.2 The Community of Douglastown

The three criteria that have historically framed belonging are integrally tied to the places of and within the community and to its landscape (Basso 1996; Bohlin 2001;

Cruikshank 1998, 2005; Offen 2003). The geographical boundaries of the community, including the historical dimensions, can be seen in Figure 2. From its founding in the 18

^th

century to the 1970s, Douglas Township stemmed from the Sap Peel Road, which leads to a popular scenic mountaintop, to the river at Bois Brûlé (White 1999). This township no longer exists and Douglastown is now said to spread from the Sap Peel Road to a train overpass bordering Seal Cove (Figure 3, see also Figure 18 on page 173).

The township as it once stood can be divided into nine areas, sub-divisions that grew out of conversations with residents of these places and which formed the

geographical confines of the research for this thesis. Referring to Figure 3, these are: Up the Bay in red, Douglastown Core and the First Range in brown, On the Point in grey, the Second Range in yellow, the Third Range in blue, Big Head in orange, Seal Cove in pink, l’Anse à Brillant in purple, and Bois Brûlé and Prevel in green. For the purposes of mapping, I have grouped together the Core and the First Range. The Core is not a term

2 Interestingly, these same three criteria have been identified by Fournier (2001) as unique in Francophone Québec: “In one of his earliest writings, Falardeau identified what he called the ‘something different’ of French Canada – traits he found in the strength of Catholicism, the French language, and the uniqueness of historical events” (338).

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Figure 3: A Breakdown of the Historic Douglas Township. February 2020, Memorial University of Newfoundland Map Room, Queen Elizabeth II Library, St. John’s NL.

Modified to include the shapes.

used locally; I have coined it to differentiate between it and the rest of the First Range,

which extends to the beach, and the space along the current highway where the bulk of

social activity takes place. As described at the beginning of this Introduction, this space

includes the church, the rectory, the Community Centre, the Holy Name Hall, and the

post office. These buildings are also sites for the numerous committees and organizations

that work for the preservation of the Catholic Church, the promotion of an Irish heritage,

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the cultural preservation and revitalization of the community, and the retention of the Anglophone community. Throughout this thesis, the term Douglastown is used to refer to the community as it is understood today, including some residents in the collective areas of the Core, the Ranges, and Up the Bay, whereas Douglas Township refers to the larger, historical space of all combined areas.

The nine areas designated above are the result of the geography of the region and how it has influenced the history of European settlement. This area of the Gaspé coast is the north-eastern edge of the peninsula in Eastern Québec (see Figure 2). It is

characterized by the meeting of the Appalachian mountain chain, here named the Chic- Choc Mountains, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence (SEPAQ 2016). Many rivers flow from the mountains into the sea, creating sandy coves that allowed easy access for fishing, historically the primary occupation along the Gaspé Coast and the reason European settlement began in the region (Ommer 1989; Mimeault 2004; Samson 1986; Sinnett and Mimeault 2009). One of the largest rivers in this area, the St. John River, produces the barachois that distinguishes Douglastown from its surrounding communities. On the beach at Douglastown, the historical combination of a large wharf and a train station, built in the early 1910s, made the town an economic hub for the region during

Douglastown’s ‘Golden Era,’ which is roughly the time period following the Great Depression to Québec’s political upheaval in the 1970s, when the secularization of the provincial government and the growth of Québec’s sovereignty movement began (White 2001a).

Several nearby rivers also created natural harbours that became sites for European

settlements centred on fishing; the Seal Cove River, the l’Anse à Brillant River, and Bois

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Brûlé were all once defined by wharves or fishing harbours of their own, a testament to the strength of the cod fishery.

³

However, Douglastown held economic dominance and these surrounding communities became amalgamated into Douglas Township, which functioned as an independent municipality until the 1970s.

Being a resident of Douglas Township and participating in the economic life of the region did not necessarily translate into being a ‘Douglastowner,’ and the people from each of these coves cultivated senses of self, community, and place attachment that were not necessarily dependent on or related to the greater township. In essence, each became a tightly-knit community unto themselves with different connections to the greater idea of Douglastown.

1.3 Theoretical Orientation

1.3.1 Emplacement, Place Attachment, and Landscape

Many stories about Douglastown are part of a repository of communal memory and are closely linked with particular places in the community, exploring which of those hold significant meaning to the community’s past, and why. The longer that one’s family history is associated with places within Douglastown and the historical Township, the more important the communal stories and places become to a sense of self and

community. In the case of some residents, their personal investment in Douglastown, where they invest meaning and importance into places and related narratives, has fed into

3 A train station and a harbour and wharf were also located in l’Anse à Brillant, which serviced the inland population as well as those on the coast. While both train stations closed in the early 20^th century, the wharf at l’Anse à Brillant is the only one still in use in the Township out of the four that once existed.

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their conceptions of home. Further, their unique attachments to specific places have transcended their individual memories to create landmarks that are significant to the entire community.

The stories of Douglastown provide a window into how places are formed,

articulated, and transmitted to others. Defined by and bound up in the social history of the area, which is characterized by a legacy of and attachment to Irish ancestry and the Catholic Church, the places of Douglastown hold incredible significance for many community members, particularly those who participate in an Irish, Catholic ancestry.

This holds true for stories set in the distant past, where places are more accessible to the audience than the people in the narrative. Stories of the past provide a means of layering ancestral place attachment with personal meaning and thereby anchoring community members in terms of both their position within the parameters of belonging and the places of significance in the community. This process is achieved through a combination of emplacement and expressions of place attachment.

Emplacement in narrative is a means of embedding the audience in an immersive experience by recreating the settings of the story.

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Familiarity with these settings allow elements of the narrative to be emphasized by the storyteller and encourages the audience to imagine the story being told. It likewise encourages both storyteller and audience to relate to the narrative and its settings on a physical and sensorial level, by invoking their own sense memories of that place (Feld 1996). The storytelling experience provides a unique opportunity to relate to place on multiple levels, the event of the narrative and its settings, as well as reinforcing notions of belonging within the community through a

4 This is touched on by Pink 2011.

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personal and historical investment in the places referred to during the event. Supposing, as Pink (2011) does, “…a place-event…an intensity or nexus of things, in process and in relation to each other” that stems from “places as intensities of activity and presence, as experienced by embodied human subjects, from specific subjectivities” (349), the

immersive experience of storytelling offers two facets in the place-event experience. The places within the community are connected to one another not merely through the settings of the story, but also through the place-events of story-telling, where the audience is called upon to relive their own stories of places within the context of the narrative event.

The process of emplacement, then, entails experiencing the place-event of the narrative while simultaneously experiencing the settings of the story through personal, relatable encounters with place.

Emplacement has meaning through re-experiencing place attachment that is developed by investing meaning in place and incorporating it into the identity of the self and of community. As Sharon Roseman and Diane Royal (2018) explain, “place

attachment…occurs as part of active, ongoing processes… [that] often include unpaid social reproductive labour” (Roseman and Royal 2018: 52), including lawn care and the beautification of individual homes (see Chapter 6). The consistent investment of time, labour, care, creativity, thought, and sense experience “[develops] emotional bonds to locations associated with specific sets of meanings, memories, social relationships, and activities across various spatial and temporal scales” (Low and Altman 1992 paraphrased in Roseman and Royal 2018: 52). Each place is a nexus of activity and meaning,

“composed of entanglements of all components of an environment” (Pink 2011: 349) and

part of a cultural narrative (350) that gives it definition within the broader community as

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well as to an individual. Forming and invoking place attachment is an entire physical and sensorial experience, whereby “experiencing and knowing place – the idea of place as sensed, place as sensation – can proceed through a complex interplay of the auditory and the visual, as well as through other intersensory processes” (Feld 1996: 98). Place- making as a continual experience and investment over time creates a sense of place that can be further invoked through narrative, intentionally and unintentionally.

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Place attachment in Douglastown stems from personal investment in place-making, but the perspective of place within a broader cultural narrative lends it value beyond the individual, providing opportunities for multiple layers of meaning and attachment for community members. This is true for both public spaces like the beach, that are easily accessible to a large number of people (resident and non-resident), and for private property that becomes historically or culturally significant through associated narratives.

Places of attachment, such as homes and tracts of land that have been in the same family for several generations (for some, this goes back to the time of European settlement), hold great meaning for those currently living there as a source of history, heritage, and pride. In these cases, place attachment for family members is accessible through the stories that are told of those places and through the time and work invested in property management, clearing trees, building infrastructure, and so on. The common lament that the landscapes of Douglastown have changed significantly in the last 50-60 years, reclaimed by brush, grass, and forest, is a comment on the amount of time, labour, industry, and vision of earlier generations that has been erased in recent years. When telling stories of places where families have invested for generations and that hold value

5 See Patterson 2015 for an example of how sense of place may manifest in the performance of music, dance, and social participation in Douglastown.

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for the community as a nexus of historical significance, the attachment to place, its sense experience, and its communal relevance within the community is both confirmed and reinforced.

Place attachment frames the parameters of belonging through associations with heritage, history, and family. Coupled with developing and expressing a sense of place and processes of emplacement, place attachment as a measure of belonging necessitates a certain amount of personal investment. To belong to the community, one must actively participate in the making of places and of community, a task that necessitates being within the community space. Members of the community who have since moved away and no longer participate in community life have the potential to participate in these processes because they have a personal and familial history within the community. Yet, their absence from the places of significance means that they cannot continue to

participate in the creation of the town in absentia. These potential members remain passive participants by keeping informed on people and activities within the town and through visiting.

⁶

In this sense, place conceptualizes the community and, by extension, is integral to how it conceptualizes itself.

As a cultural group, Gaspesians frequently express their attachment to place

through a variety of means, including those who are no longer able to actively participate in place-making (see, for example, Boyle 2004, 2007; Boyle and the Barburners 2004;

DeVouge 2010; Leggo 2011; LePage 2014. See Patterson 2014 and 2015 for how this affects the diasporic music community).

⁷

Many community members across Gaspé who

6 Other means include letter writing and phone calls to friends and family, subscribing to the local newspaper, and the increasingly dominant methods of social media and e-mail.

7 Regarding the spelling of Gaspesians, I have chosen to follow the spelling convention most common within the community, supported by certain publications (such as Patterson 2014, 2017, and 2019).

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have since moved away articulate a desire or a need to return to the area periodically.

This is demonstrated in the lyrics to a song written by Paul Lepage for his wife, who grew up in Haldimand (a town across the barachois from Douglastown), entitled “The Sands of Haldimand” that emphasizes her need to return to Haldimand Beach in order to find herself and feel that she is at home. Specific places, like Haldimand Beach, are often cited as fundamental to this need according to individual life experience, clearly

articulating how a strong attachment to place is fundamental to individual identity

construction, but also on a scale that encompasses the entire cultural group of Gaspesians (Leggo 2011, see also Basso 1996; Bohlin 2001; Cole 2009; Daniels, Baldacchino, and Vodden 2015; Degnen 2015; Martin 2003; Offen 2003; Roseman and Royal 2018; Tuan 1991). This attachment is articulated in a variety of artistic works produced on the Gaspé coast and in the narratives associated with Douglastown.

As an active agent, place manifests through its influence on community residents, holding collective investments of memory, emotion, and narrative. While community members may understand and know the history of various places in Douglastown, they are also expected to invest in the town, creating their own individual stories and

experiences of place and sharing them with others. This leads to the consistent creation of place where it, like community, is perpetually being created (Lustiger-Thaler 1994, see also Bohlin 2001; Brehm 2007; Daniels, Baldacchino, and Vodden 2015; Martin 2003;

Nash 1999; Ó hAllmhuráin 2016; Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017; Tuan 1991). Within this process, these places are constantly in flux in relation to one another as well, since they cannot be considered as separate, isolated units, but exist in concord with the

However, spelling this term as Gaspésians is also acceptable and found within literature (see, for example, The Burlington Post 2009).

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fluctuating meaning ascribed to them by each individual and by the community as a whole. Each place of significance within each individual story exists in a tapestry – an interconnected text that is both a compilation of many places and an active agent in its own right. Hence, individuals relate to specific places and to the tapestry of

interconnected places in two ways: as members of the community with its communal memory and as individuals cultivating personal relationships to place.

This tapestry likewise contributes to the landscapes of Douglastown, which exist both within and without social relationships (see for example Basso 1996; Daniels, Baldacchino, and Vodden 2015; Guo 2003; Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017). More than just background, landscape “is a part of ourselves, a thing in which we move and think”

(Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017: 5). It is not static, fixed, or unchanging, but is

constructed consistently and often in contestation, depending on the individuals or groups involved. A conglomeration of places and the connections between them, landscape also encompasses the views that constitute and frame the places, actions, and lives of

community members and residents. It remains fundamental to identity, history, culture, and place: “landscape as cultural process is dependent on the cultural and historical context...[it] is not only the background of human actions but the outcome of the

engagement between people and world in particular historical and local conditions” (Guo 2003: 201). As the backdrop for community life and as an agent of personal and

communal investment, landscape has a significant position within the narratives about places and community that form the parameters of belonging.

Place, then, is a multi-faceted concept that encompasses emplacement, place

attachment, and landscape and is expressed, within this thesis, in concordance with

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narrative. Julie Cruikshank (2005) describes the relationship between stories and place:

“Humans persist in transforming seemingly neutral spaces into places of significance. A growing body of research about social memory argues that landscapes are places of remembrance and that culturally similar landforms may provide a kind of archive where memories can be mentally stored” (Cruikshank 2005: 11), where memories are accessible through written stories, oral history, and other forms of narrative (see also Basso 1996;

Chase Smith et al. 2003; Lambert 2010; Offen 2003; Orlove 1990; Sletto 2009; Smith 2003). Place here is more than a context for daily life (Lefebvre 1991[1974]; Unwin 2000) – it transcends the everyday to become a repository of memory for individuals and communities, allowing a narrative to be built that, in turn, informs communal identities associated with place (Basso 1996; Bohlin 2001; Cruikshank 1998, 2005; Feld 1996).

This echoes what Keith Basso (1996) has termed place-making, “a universal tool of the

historical imagination” (5), that seeks to satisfy human curiosity about events in certain

areas. Place-making requires imagination and memory to create “a particular universe of

objects and events – in short, a place-world – wherein portions of the past are brought

into being” (Basso 1996: 6, emphasis in original). Further, “if place-making is a way of

constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of

constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities” (Basso

1996: 7, emphasis in original). This is accomplished through the telling and re-telling of

stories, a vehicle for place-making and exploring emplacement. A place, then, is not only

the venue for everyday life: it becomes the outward expression of an identity associated

with the self and with relationships between that self and others in the past, present, and

future.

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1.3.2 Local Knowledge and the Reproduction of Stories

As stories bring places into being, they create and transmit knowledge. Knowledge production through storytelling and place is neither static nor universally applicable (Cruikshank 2005). Instead, it is inherently emplaced and locally produced: “embodied in life experiences and reproduced in everyday behaviour and speech” (Cruikshank 2005:

9). Knowledge of the past is similarly re-enacted through personal encounters with places that hold historical meaning, reproduced in the present through the telling and re-telling of stories, and emplaced through the event of its telling and its settings (Cruikshank 1998;

Fine and Haskell Spear 1992; Pink 2011). The reproductions or performances of

narratives that explore historical themes, people, or events are neither separate from the social context of their enactment, nor divorced from personal investment, that is, the meaning individuals put into stories and places (Bauman 1984[1977]; Flueckiger 2003;

Sawin 2002; Somers 1994; Wickwire 2005). As the telling of stories is a social activity,

“created in the everyday situations in which they are told” (Cruikshank 1998: xv), they have meaning through their enactment and seek to project meaning from the storyteller to the listeners.

Narratives about the past, then, cannot be divorced from the present due to their performance and the reactions they engender from the audience. The storyteller is able

“to speak the past into being, to summon it with words and give it dramatic form, to

produce experience by forging ancestral worlds in which others can participate and

readily lose themselves” (Basso 1996: 32, emphasis original). Together, both storyteller

and audience bring the past into being through narrative in a complex process that

involves the place-event of the narrative itself, the settings of the story and the senses of

place associated with them, and the story being recounted (Feld 1996; Pink 2011).

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Historical stories are not fixed deliveries of fact, but are dependent on individual interpretation, circumstance, and the frequency of their repetition.

And so, the historical narratives presented throughout this thesis are based on local knowledge and influenced by the cultural backgrounds and personal histories of

storytellers and audiences. At the same time, these narratives simultaneously reflect the differences among the varied, sometimes competing, individuals and groups involved in highlighting and preserving the places and events of significance in Douglastown (Basso 1996; Bohlin 2001; Cruikshank 1998, 2005; Degnen 2015; Edwards 1998; Guo 2003;

Jianxiong 2009; Nash 1999; Offen 2003; Silverman and Gulliver 1992; Stewart and Strathern 2003). As Bohlin (2001) describes, “the process of remembering is a

profoundly social activity in which the past is invoked to construe, reproduce, or alter one’s relationship with the world” (274); while individuals tell similar stories differently and highlight some shared stories over others, its enactment is inherently social. Since any member of a community is or can become a storyteller, multiple narratives or interpretations of the past are available for those stories that hold communal importance and are repeated often (Cruikshank 2005; Langellier and Peterson 1992; Wickwire 2005).

From this collection of stories, a group emerges that support and validate one

theme. Through repetition, this theme becomes dominant; not necessarily a single story,

the dominant narrative theme is a means by which a collection of stories is in accord with

itself and is the most commonly accepted collection within a particular group. While

alternatives to the dominant narrative theme are not necessarily unknown, they may

disappear through relative disuse over time. In Douglastown, a dominant theme both

establishes and echoes the parameters of belonging: as an English-speaking, Catholic, and

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Irish heritage defines the identity of the community, its inhabitants, and its places. The narratives that do not support the reproduction of these three criteria tend to be absorbed, forgotten, or altered until they conform to the tenets presented by the dominant theme.

While a dominant theme, like the one encountered in Douglastown, is reinforced by official organizations – in this context, the Catholic Church and (in the past) the Catholic English-language school – it is not separated from local knowledge production by

inhabitants. Its reproduction is affected by “[t]acit knowledge embodied in life

experiences and reproduced in everyday behavior and speech” (Cruikshank 2005: 9), as well as the circumstances involved in the telling of stories, including the particulars of each place-event. In sum, the theme itself may change over time and space, through repetition and challenges to the boundaries it sets (Silverman and Gulliver 1992; Somers 1994). Thus, “if the past can be invented once in response to changes in the present, then it can be (and has been) reinvented later on in further response” (Silverman and Gulliver 1992: 21, see also Hobsbawm 1983a, 1983b). The anthropology of history is one

approach of accessing these inventions and reinventions, as well as the contextual effects that encourage a reformulation of a particular past (Silverman and Gulliver 1992).

⁸

This formulation allows an exploration of “how constructions of the past are used to explain the present…how the past is created in the present…[and] how the past created and recreated the past” (Silverman and Gulliver 1992: 16). In other words, the dominant narrative theme, while established over time, inherently remains subject to the concerns

8 Silverman and Gulliver (1992) are here using the terms “invention and reinvention” to refer to the process whereby “people explain the past to themselves, just as they explain, rationalize, and justify their present.

From this perspective, history is ideology, and like any ideology, it is open to manipulation and reformulation while it is believed by many to be ‘true’ and correct” (20).

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of the present through its narrative reproduction and through the place-events that create or encourage its re-telling.

In the small, rural, and long-established community of Douglastown, the dominant narrative theme relies on oral historical narratives, tied to place and landscape, that function to create the parameters of belonging to place and to community (see also Basso 1996; Casella 2012; Cruikshank 2005). In Douglastown, written versions of history tend to be closely tied to oral narratives and vice versa, whether as a source or as a point of contention (Casella 2012). The choice of narrative being told by the storyteller is

influenced by an individual’s sense of self as much as by circumstance, audience, setting, and so on. Flueckiger (2003) illustrates this when discussing how a Muslim woman in Hyderabad uses her self-identity as a healer to bring meaning to the narratives and performances of her stories, where they “frame and articulate a worldview in which spiritual healing is effective” (267). The maintenance of the dominant narrative theme is as susceptible to these variables as individual stories. Furthermore, the choice of which stories to tell and re-tell is, in turn, susceptible to the pressures of the dominant narrative theme, contributing to its evolution and establishment as a primary vessel to describe the people, places, and events within the community, while simultaneously affecting

narratives that do not fit its basic tenets.

The reproduction of a dominant narrative is, at its core, a personal choice. The

choice of which stories to tell, where to tell them, and how often they are repeated form

the process of constructing communal narratives; that is, stories that are well known and

accessible to all members of the community (Sawin 2002). The narrative is continuously

being reproduced subject to individual interpretation, where storytellers are then able to

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adapt the narrative to fit personal or political purposes. This is evident in the competition for financial resources to preserve community cultural activities and buildings (Historia 2012, as well as Irish Week and the Country Festival described in Chapter 3). And so, the narrative is shaped as it is told and retold by a variety of community members, thereby allowing the dominant narrative theme to come into being and be reinforced over time.

Next, a dominant narrative theme can become concretized through processes like commemoration. Commemoration takes particular stories and enshrines them in community memory by dedicating specific places or objects to groups, people, events, and more. For example, the street name “Loyalist Road” commemorates the first settler group in the area and a wooden cross stands as a monument to the presence of Francophones On the Point (as in Figure 16). As Azaryahu (1995) describes,

“[c]ommemorative street names, together with commemorative monuments and heritage museums, not only evince a particular version of history, but are also participants in the ongoing cultural production of a shared past” (312). Further,

“spatial commemorations in particular, which merge history and physical environment, are instrumental in the naturalization of the commemorated past”

(Azaryahu 1995: 319), tying particular stories to particular locales, and bringing place into definitions of belonging (Azaryahu 1996; Basso 1996; Cruikshank 1998, 2005;

Edwards 1998; Guo 2003; Nash 1999; Strathern 1981; Tuan 1991). Commemorative places within a community not only enshrine particular versions of history, they also provide focal points for narratives that lend legitimacy to the storyteller and reinforce the particular story being told. They validate particular communal narratives, as the St.

Patrick statue on the church validates the Irish heritage of the community, and provide

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convenient landmarks for storytelling purposes, serving as focal points for settings during storytelling events.

The relationship between place and narrative is a manifestation of the creation and maintenance of community for Anglophones in Douglastown, which, in turn, has fed into processes of belonging. Since the claim to an ancestral heritage has been one tool for framing belonging and an integral piece of storytelling practices, ascription to that heritage as a means of self-identity enhances the significance associated with processes of place-making, and the subsequent place-worlds of the sort Basso (1996) describes, by imbuing them with the ability to determine belonging to place. Coupled with Cruikshank’s (2005) discussion of local knowledge, which comes from

familiarity with and investment in one’s surroundings, community members are able to communicate about people and places in forms that may not be recognizable or understood by outsiders without the framework experienced by community members.

1.3.3 Defining Community as a Reflection of the Dominant Narrative Theme And so, the dominant theme in Douglastown relies heavily on the narrative of Irishness and the related themes of local heritage, English language use, and Catholicism.

Together, they have served to frame belonging to the community, defining places of significance which are, in turn, transmitted and re-affirmed through the process of storytelling. While the places that serve as focal points for storytelling are bounded within a particular geographic area, the community itself is not equal to “all people living within (or born within, or registered to vote within) a given territory” (O’Rourke 2006:

2). Rather, ascription to and reproduction of the dominant narrative theme is the measure

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of belonging to the community, coupled with attachment to place and local heritage in a complex web that transcends the individual and echoes over generations of family members. There is a growing proportion of people living within the territory of

Douglastown, and within the historic Douglas Township, that do not fit these criteria (for a similar situation, see Strathern 1981). Community, then, is framed by the parameters of belonging and investment in and knowledge of place and place-related narrative, rather than residence. Likewise, length of residence does not necessarily denote acceptance into the community. While place and place attachment are fundamental parts of community identity and heritage, living somewhere is insufficient to determine belonging in a community even where that attachment exists.

Gupta and Ferguson (1997) explain how places are imagined by those who live there as much as by those who live away (see also, Bohlin 2001). A variety in population therefore means a variety in imagining, relating to, and investing in place, belying the homogeneity that is assumed through ascription to or belief in the dominant narrative theme (for a similar situation within ethnic groups, see Talai 1986). Indeed, both old and new residents have expressed a strong attachment to the places and landscapes of

Douglastown (see Chapter 6). However, being privy to and complicit in creating narrative in and through place does not equate inclusion within the community, even when the stories being told are part of the dominant narrative theme. Community is better defined flexibly, as Diane O’Rourke (2006) details:

Without the assumption that residence in a place and membership in a group

are naturally attached, local community must be imagined in at least four

senses: 1) its existence as a group of mutually-obligated people linked with

that locale; 2) as belonging to a place bounded from other places; 3) its

identity, what type of community it is; 4) the basis for membership in or

exclusion from the group (O’Rourke 2006: 3).

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Claiming an Irish heritage is a fundamental tool when implementing O’Rourke’s definition in Douglastown. Thus: 1) many of the families descended from the original European settlers are inter-linked through marriage, thereby creating mutual-obligation and a desire to help one another. Even if this is not the case, the culture of the community is such that neighbours have been expected to help one another when needed. One of the complaints community members have about recent in-migrants is that the latter do not seek to help, socialize with, or otherwise interact with their neighbours, thereby changing the nature of their understanding of an assumed relationship between being part of a community within the place of residence;

⁹

2) Irishness sets a physical and cultural limit to what may be defined as Douglastown based on the historical limits of Douglas Township coupled with participation in or a relationship to Catholicism and English language use; 3) an Irish heritage gives some community members a means of defining themselves as separate and distinct from other community members and from those in nearby communities; and 4) Irishness provides the basis for establishing, enforcing, and detailing the other boundary criteria through its historical association with those

Europeans who first settled the town.

That being said, community is always “in the making” (Lustiger-Thaler 1994: 21);

the Irishness of Douglastown cannot be assumed as static and unchanging over time and space. In fact, as the theme relies on storytellers for its reproduction, the preoccupations

9 Here and elsewhere in the thesis, I am following the designations of residents laid out by Brehm (2007) of

native residents (defined as those born and raised within the community and who are currently living there – typically, I prefer the use of community member when referring to ‘real Douglastowners’), long-term residents, and recent in-migrant, as well as adding the designation of out-migrant, with the understanding that out-migrants may also be frequent visitors. For clarification, I define long-term residents roughly as those living in the community for over 10 years, recent in-migrants as less than 10 years, and out-migrants as those who have had permanent residence outside of the community for a significant period of time.

These are defined as length of residence at the time of research, in 2012.

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of the present may inform individual interpretation of the past (Edwards 1998). The current emphasis on being Anglophone in general and Irish in specific is related to the arrival of new migrants over the past two decades, coupled with out-migration and a general aging of the original population (Vision Gaspé-Percé Now 2016). As community members see themselves ‘dying out,’ they have held onto the pieces that differentiate them from others (Peace 1989). This, coupled with evidence of a strong interest in ancestry and community heritage, feeds a re-evaluation of who the community is, how membership is defined, where the boundaries of belonging ought to be established, and the flexibility of those boundaries.

1.3.4 Defining the Boundaries of Community Belonging

The dominant narrative theme provides the framework for understanding the historical boundaries of belonging and thereby determining who could have traditionally laid claim to community membership. Such boundaries are established by and through the identity that individuals ascribe to a community (Badone 1987; Cohen 2000;

Nyamjoh 2011; Strathern 1981; Talai 1986; de Vidas 2008). The identity of

Douglastowners was historically linked to the dominant historical theme of an emplaced Irish heritage accessible through narrative (Basso 1996; Cruikshank 2005; Somers 1994).

¹⁰

This applies to the construction of the town’s history, to the way that the

10 In recent years, these narratives have most commonly been reproduced during Irish Week, a festival celebrating an Irish heritage, which usually contains several presentations on the history of the community.

Having their history discussed during this festival reinforces the dominant narrative even if the subject matter is only subjectively related to Douglastown. The best example of this is the Carricks shipwreck, which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 2, as well as in Ó hAllmhuráin 2016 and 2020.

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English-speaking residents have and do describe themselves, and to how the community presents itself to outsiders (including those residing within the community).

The use of history and ancestry as a basis for identity is a choice that is consistently made by community members in the present and is therefore affected by the concerns, preoccupations, and goals of each person. While members of different cultural groups interpret and ascribe different meanings to the same event, revolving around the fluidity of historical events and how their interpretation influences perceptions of the past (Cruikshank 2005), “participation in [a]…group does not necessarily connote or require that the members so drawn share corporate interests or one set of values” (Talai 1986:

252).

¹¹

Thus, the homogeneity assumed through a majority of community members investing in one dominant narrative theme obscures the nature of choice and lends it the appearance of inevitability. However, individuals hold variable goals when reaffirming the dominant narrative theme, as do their audiences. In Douglastown, the town is remembered in narrative as a vibrant, thriving place of economic, religious, and social significance, that has now been relegated to the position of ‘bedroom community’ for the town of Gaspé. This has significantly affected the identity of the community as a whole and of its individual members. Using the dominant narrative theme to define how the community is remembered allows the boundaries of belonging to appear normalized and inevitable, thereby naturalizing their definition of community and of identity.

11 Talai is referring to an ethnic group in this 1986 article. The community in Douglastown shares many of the same characteristics as ethnic groups within Talai’s definition, but not all: “Ethnic consciousness is achieved and maintained through inter-group competition [for resources]” (1986: 265). From consciousness to the development of an ethnic identity, “ethnic ascription provides a sense of possible community

between people recognizing each other as belonging to the same ethnic category” (Talai 1986: 266). For community members in Douglastown, a shared Irish history is not enough of a factor to develop an ethnic consciousness, particularly in comparison with identity as a minority-language Anglophone in Québec.

Rather, the shared mindset expresses itself through local heritage.

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The establishment of a community identity, then, is more complex than a group of individuals who continuously ascribe to one set of norms and traditions (Talai 1986).

According to individuals who have been both included and excluded throughout their lifetimes, the parameters of belonging are perceived to have been applied differently in the past than they are in the present. Now, the framework appears to be broadened to include greater numbers of English-speakers living in and around the historical

Township, even as the boundaries are articulated most concisely by those who feel they are or have been excluded from belonging in the past. This opens up the narratives and their associated places to a wider audience, who may not have experienced the same level of emotional and cultural investment, and reconstructs narratives into teaching tools that transmit the local, cultural significance of certain traditions to others.

The creation and maintenance of boundaries provides a framework for establishing community through processes of inclusion and exclusion; through time, they provide a basis for members deciding what or who does and does not belong (Cohen 1982). This in turn affects the evolution of dominant narrative themes and forms place attachment by choosing who contributes to building the places of meaning within the community and the communal narrative. While the boundaries themselves may be flexible, the

framework that guides their application has been created and developed over time. This

framework does not change in substance, even as it is blurred, hidden, combined, and

influenced, as dictated by changing social, political, economic, and other circumstances

(Gidal 2014: 104-105). In this sense, the community itself “emerges as an affective

patterning of social practices closely tied to people’s ongoing desires for collective

exchanges and need-satisfaction” (Lustiger-Thaler 1994: 21). Strathern (1981) notes of

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Elmdon: “We have seen that ‘real Elmdon’ is best thought of as an idea rather than a set of people as such...the core families who are most regularly cited as real Elmdon are not a segment of the population sociologically bounded off from the rest...it is the boundary- effect of the image we have to explain” (82, emphasis original). The effects of the boundaries in Douglastown on those who have been excluded tie directly to issues of power and accessibility to the dominant narrative theme and the places of significance within the town.

1.4 The Context

In Douglastown, community and identity are tied to place and to the relationships between the small, colloquial subdivisions that divide the historical Township and the greater town of Gaspé. These locally-defined boundaries are apparent within the

Anglophone minority, where communities define themselves in part through comparison with their neighbours. Hence, the encounters between different factions or groups within what appears to be a homogenous whole “may involve a perpetual debate in which participants strive to impress their views on one another and in the process influence the organization and boundary of their…group” (Talai 1986: 252).

¹²

The community of Douglastown has always existed within the context of the greater Gaspesian population, and this is especially true for the current English-speaking population. The community under study is one of many along the coast that once had a population of majority English-speakers. Other nearby communities to the north and south (such as Haldimand, Wakeham, York, parts of Gaspé, Lobster Cove, Barachois,

12 See previous footnote.

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Malbay, and so on) were similarly largely Anglophone.

¹³

Douglastown differentiates itself from other historically Anglophone areas in Gaspé by promoting an Irish heritage.

This process of differentiation comes at least in part because of increasing touristic and academic interest in the area over the past two decades, which encourages the retelling and exploration of the community’s past. It is reinforced by cultural activities, projects, and events influenced by increasing numbers of French-speaking residents, who affect the composition of the town, as well as increased promotion of the Anglophone

community (Vision Gaspé-Percé Now 2016).

The historical European populations on the Gaspé coast consisted of pockets of English-speaking and French-speaking populations living in different areas that bordered one another (Almond 2010; Mimeault 2004; Sinnett and Mimeault 2009). These

European settlers arrived to land that was held by the Mi’gmaq, who currently form the nations of Gespeg, Gesgapegiag, and Listuguj. Interactions between these three groups, French settlers, English settlers, and Mi’gmaq inhabitants, appear to have been primarily for economic purposes, as described in Paul Almond’s (2010) fictional rendition of early settler life on the Gaspé Coast. Here, for example, Almond describes the differences and relationships between New Carlisle, a Loyalist settlement, and neighbouring Paspébiac, a French-populated working-class town, in the first book of his fictive, historically-based The Alford Saga, set in the early 19

^th

century (around 1800).

¹⁴

These two communities are described in the novel as fundamentally different – from the ship-building culture of French-speakers who participate in the truck system to the farming settlement of New

13 The communities listed here currently comprise parts of present-day Gaspé and Percé.

14 Loyalists was a term applied to British sympathizers who moved north into the British colonies of what would become Canada, following the American War of Independence in 18^th century.

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Carlisle.

¹⁵

The view of the Loyalist agriculturists toward the French labourers can be summarized in the following quote, where the protagonist (a deserter from the British army who is currently hiding as a French ship-builder in Paspébiac) is questioning a New Carlisle settler:

“Sir, forgive my ignorance, but why are you United Empire Loyalists all in New Carlisle? Why not in Paspébiac?”

“No choice. They brought us here and told us any land to the east and west was taken up by them damned French Acadians. Lieutenant-Governor Cox’s doing” (Almond 2010: 118).

While the relations between these two communities are portrayed in the novel as strained, at least from a social perspective, the many communities along the coast did participate in mutually-beneficial economic relationships. That being said, they frequently operated through an impartial third party, most commonly Robin, Jones and Whitman Ltd., a fishing company that virtually monopolized the cod industry along the coast and throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (Beaton Institute Archives – Memory NS n.d.; Mimeault 2004; Samson 1986; Sinnett and Mimeault 2009).

When the provincial government amalgamated the smaller townships in the 1970s to create the towns and municipalities as they stand now (for Douglastown, this meant amalgamation into the town of Gaspé), coupled with the passing of legislation designed to protect the French population of Québec in the same time period, the primacy of these English-speaking pockets began to recede economically and politically (Caldwell 1994;

Fortier 1994; Fournier 2001; Hamers and Humel 1994; Schmid, Zepa, and Smite 2004).

15 The truck system is an economic model whereby the employee is paid for labour in goods as opposed to money. Within this system, the employee would usually receive the goods necessary for a season of work on credit, gambling that the work would be adequate to pay off the balance at the end of the season (Higgins 2007; Ommer 1989; Samson 1986).

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Over time, residents were faced with their categorization as a linguistic minority, one that subsequently became more pronounced as out-migration increased due to declining opportunities for employment and other reasons, leaving behind a largely monolingual, aging, Anglophone population (Patterson 2014; Vision Gaspé-Percé Now 2016). Before this point, Anglophones were able to conduct their business and their social lives by contacting the Francophone community as much or as little as they desired. The passing of Bill 101 in 1977 made French the official language of the province and ultimately required the Anglophone population to change the language of business from English to French. Simultaneously, the legislature sparked a social change that prioritized

Francophones by requiring that all individuals, groups, employers, government employees, and others providing services speak in French. This social change and the movements that led to this and other legislative changes is referred to as the Quiet Revolution in Québec, a social and political movement in the province from the 1960s to the 1980s.

¹⁶

The change in legislation concerning language usage, as well as the separatist movement in Québec that called for independence from Canada and the subsequent referendums in 1980 and 1995, has had a two-fold effect on the Anglophone population:

(1) it created solidarity among English-speakers in opposition to French-speakers, who were then characterized as ‘other’ and essentially different in terms of social

relationships;

¹⁷

and (2) it created a perception among Anglophones that their community

16 See Chapter 5 for a more in-depth discussion of this movement.

17 For example, some of the rhetoric from the Anglophone population about Douglastown’s relationship to the town of Gaspé as a whole and about the new migrants is paraphrased as follows: Douglastown is a bedroom community for Gaspé; Francophones don’t appreciate the view (a colloquial term meaning a view of the water) of Douglastown, they would rather be back in the woods where it is more private; French- speaking neighbours are less interested in getting to know/helping out their Anglophone neighbours than vice versa; and so on.

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was being subsumed by the Francophone population and subsequently had a limited future. As a result of a perceived threat to the continuity of the Anglophone population, communities like Douglastown emphasized their roots and asserted their histories of settlement in the area as though the memory of their contributions to its development were also in danger of disappearing, a sentiment that is not entirely unfounded given their relative obscurity in past works about Québec’s history (such as that described by Ronald Rudin’s 1985 exploration of Anglophone populations in Québec). Simultaneously, perpetuating and consistently advocating a ‘dying culture’ rhetoric (for another example of this, see Peace 1989), leads to what Richard Element (2003) describes as the

socialization of young people to leave the area in order to achieve personal success. At the same time, by holding so tightly to the importance of their history and culture and by consistently citing an attachment to place (for example, LePage 2014), the older

generation instills a strong sense of Gaspesian heritage in their children (Leggo 2011).

Thus, within the perspective that the traditionally Anglophone areas are dying, lies a counter-current of pride and a need to assert their unique culture and heritage.

Gaspesians tend to characterize themselves as ‘just different’ from people in other places,

regardless of the languages they speak. For example, a recent article in the Montreal

Gazette explored the difference in speech patterns found in a study by Charles Boberg

and Jenna Hotton (2015) among English-speakers on the Gaspé coast: “roughly 9,000

native English-speakers still inhabit the region, and the way they use the language helps

define them as a community” (Abley 2015: n.p.). Further, an article published in the

English-language newspaper, The Gaspé Spec, describes a phenomenon occurring in the

Baie des Chaleurs area of “halves,” where people of all language groups are cutting bills

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in half and using the two pieces as a form of barter (Gagné 2015). The trend is portrayed as a way to reinforce community ties and this, in turn, is portrayed as “different” from what typically happens in other places. One of the pioneers of this movement is quoted as saying: “The ideal scenario would be to create our own Gaspesian currency,” illustrating a desire to reiterate just how different the Gaspesian communities are from others across the country (Gagné 2015).

And so, it is within this tension between perceived cultural death yet proud and proclaimed difference that the community of Douglastown articulates its individuality within the larger Gaspesian culture. By promoting itself as a place of Irish heritage, it carves a piece of the cultural pie for its own. This effort is echoed significantly in only one other place along the coast, Cascapédia-Saint-Jules (near New Richmond and the reserve of Gesgapegiag, see Figure 2), despite the presence of Irish migrants in other places in the Gaspé Peninsula. Indeed, these two Irish communities are unusual in the province of Québec, where many Irish migrants were assimilated into Francophone language and culture as a result of a shared Catholicism, particularly those outside of metropolitan areas like Montréal (Akenson 1996; Redmond 1985; Rudin 1985). As such, Douglastown’s Irish heritage activities have an edge in the fight for resources, primarily federal and provincial government provided financial resources for cultural projects, like the Douglastown Irish Week and the restoration of the Holy Name Hall (Historia 2012).

Since Douglastown can lay claim to this unique heritage, it is in a better position to preserve its institutions and historical places than the smaller members of its once-

municipality, such as Seal Cove, l’Anse à Brillant, and Bois Brûlé. This has subsequently

affected how the parameters of belonging have been stretched today, as opposed to how

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they are perceived to have existed in the past: where these communities cultivated identities separate from Douglastown in past generations, they are now encouraged to adopt the larger fold of Douglastowner identity.

1.5 The Research Process

The research that informs this thesis was collected in 2012 over six months of ethnographic fieldwork that relied on three methods: interviews with 17 participants, participatory mapping with 11 participants, participant observation, and the collection of a number of text: those archived in the Gaspé Museum and the Douglastown Community Centre as well as publications that were locally produced, based on local subjects, and/or sold in Gaspé. The interviews were thematic and unstructured; essentially, all participants were asked what they would like to share about Douglastown and, for participatory mapping, if they would draw a map of Douglastown. This provided a window into what the term ‘Douglastown’ conveys in terms of community, place, routes, and connections between each of these. Interviewees were chosen from a variety of locations,

A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Local Irishness: Storytelling, Heritage, and Place Attachment in Douglastown, Québec

by © Angelina Leggo